Milk is used as raw material for fabricating various products usable in the chemical or food industries.
In particular, it is known to extract casein by precipitation, which casein is then transformed, for example into a jelling agent suitable for use in particular in making soups, desserts, ices, yogurts, or pork butchery products, or indeed for use in industries other than the food industry.
Nevertheless, in order to be usable, casein must initially be transformed into soluble caseinate.
To do this, caseinate is manufactured from casein, i.e. from milk proteins which are subjected to chemical transformation to enable them to absorb water.
Various categories of caseinate exist, including sodium caseinate and calcium caseinate. Sodium caseinate is the result of kneading casein, sodium hydroxide, and water, while calcium caseinate is the result of kneading casein, ammonium hydroxide, calcium hydroxide, and water, and possibly also ammonia.
Until now, the chemical reaction has been performed in a reactor in the presence of a large quantity of water and after several minutes caseinate is obtained which then needs to be dried in order to obtain a powder that presents poor solubility.
Installations that have been used until now for making caseinate are thus bulky and require large reactors and large dryers and such installations consume large quantities of water and of energy.
Furthermore, the installations that have been used up until now require numerous handling operations between various workstations.